A/N: Written for my tumblr friend, twiceexiled, who recently requested I write a Dany/Jorah fic for the prompt "family." This may not exactly have been what she had in mind, but it was the idea that formed in mine. ;) An interlude set during Chapter 12 of ACOK. Thanks to malintzin for beta reading! And to all of you who are mothers, Happy Mother's Day!
Vigil
By night the walls of Vaes Tolorro looked less like the remains of a corpse picked clean by carrion birds than it did by day, but Jorah Mormont liked it little better under cover of darkness. The cookfires which dotted the ruined plaza painted the bone white blood red, and as he made his way through the camp the shadows of flames shifted across the crumbling façades, making the place appear strange to his eyes though he'd scoured it watchfully for any sign of danger that might befall them after sunset. It was stuff of ghost stories bandied by old women; gods knew the little khalasar that took refuge in this place they called the City of Bones had no lack of those. The young women were just as bad, though, he thought, staring hard at the back of the handmaid who scurried ahead. My handmaids say there are ghosts here, Daenerys had told him.
A northman born and bred, Jorah was no stranger to tales that made the hair stand on the back of his neck and the blood run icy his veins. Up till now, he'd always regarded them as just that: fictions invented to frighten children into behaving. Now, though, he limped as quickly behind Irri as his injured hip allowed him, feeling chased by a moan which echoed through the fallen archways and vacant windows of the dead city.
When they reached the queen's tent, he scarcely waited for the handmaid to announce him and Daenerys to bid him enter before he ducked beneath the tent flap.
At once, as the skins fell back into place, the moan was muffled, if not entirely muted. Jorah released his breath, and his heart seemed to beat again.
"Your grace sent for me? What is my queen's pleasure?"
The formal titles seemed almost ludicrous, given that their addressee huddled in the skin of a desert lion, her own hair burnt away to little more than the fuzz that covered the peaches they'd found here, yet Jorah had beheld no ruler more worthy of them-the three young dragons who presided from a perch in the corner were a testament to the fact.
At the moment, however, Daenerys sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, and Jorah thought how small she looked, and how young; her lack of hair made her eyes appear impossibly huge in her thin face, recalling the waif he'd all but forgotten from her early days in the khalasar. Almost as soon as the thought flitted through his mind she sat up straight, shrugging off the skin-beneath it she wore the painted horsehair vest which showed the roundness of her breasts between the lacings, and a pair of sandsilk trousers that clung like a second skin to her curving hips-and looked up at him with a smile that said she had not a care in the world. Indeed, after their recent ordeal in the Red Waste, this sojourn in the City of Bones, with aught else to do but rest and take nourishment, was easy. He need not fear what his queen did not. He wished he'd brought her another peach.
Daenerys extended her small hand to him and Jorah took it with as much delicacy as his own large roughened fingers could manage, thinking she sought a hand up. Instead, she gave it a tug, indicating he should join her on the cushions.
"Only the pleasure of your company."
The surprise must have shown on his face, because Daenerys laughed as he lowered himself beside her onto the silks, pausing to unbuckle his sword belt and set it aside; he stifled a groan when the movement aggravated his wounded hip.
"Not many use that word to describe my company," he said, aware even as the words fell from his lips of the tone others called gruff. But as the queen gestured for her maids to bring food and drink and then leave them, the glimmer in her eyes, which made the hues seem to shift from the deeper blue-violet to an almost pinkish lilac, like an amethyst catching the light, or the winter lights in the northern skies, told him she did not mind.
"I've cultivated strange tastes in these easterly lands." She giggled again. "Truly, bears are exotic creatures here."
"Says the Mother of Dragons," Jorah teased, popping a couple of olives into his mouth. He chewed slowly as three lithe shadows moved across the tent wall; the dragons had awoken and now uncurled themselves, stretched, and hopped down from their perch to peck at Daenerys.
"Little beggers," she chided them affectionately, stroking the black beast's-Drogon's-head before she took a piece of smoking meat from a brazier.
All three squabbled over it, but their squawks and Daenerys' admonishments to mind their manners, there was plenty for everyone, were swallowed up by a scream in the encampment.
Despite Jorah's previous unease, his hand did not grasp the hilt of his sword, nor did his gaze go to the tent flap. Instead he watched Daenerys raise her cup to her lips, her calm belied by the darkening of her eyes as she drew in on herself again, reaching instinctually with her free hand for her hrakkar once, Jorah knew why she had sought his company.
Earlier in the day, one of the women had been going about her work when her bag of waters unexpectedly burst, creating a stir among the camp. Her time, the women said, was near, but there had been no sign before that of imminent labor, except that she had been most industrious since they found this place, cleaning a space and constructing a shelter for herself and her other two small children.
Maege had always gone into a similar domestic frenzy before her babes came, Jorah remembered. He ought to have done before now...ought to have recognized the signs and prepared Daenerys for this.
Somehow.
"You look far away," her voice unexpectedly interrupted his musings. He blinked and found himself gazing into her soft, sad eyes. "Are you on Bear Island?"
Tell me the name of your ghost, Jorah.
He swallowed. "Aye," he answered, no more able to deny her now than he had then.
She lay her hand on his forearm, bared by his rolled-up sleeve. "Forgive me if my jape about the exotic caused you pain. I did not think."
"I've a thicker skin than that, my queen," he said, studying the contrast of her lightly tanned fingers against the swarthiness of his own skin as she stroked the wiry dark hair that curled over his arm. "Or a hairier pelt."
It wasn't the most jocular of tones, but nevertheless she caught the humor, a smile returning faintly-only for her face to fall when the woman cried out again.
Jorah considered whether there was anything he might do could alleviate Daenerys' distress. Take a walk further from the camp? Ghosts aside, he was leery of what lurked in the shadows of this dead city. Ask the midwives to stifle the mother's cries? He knew from experience never to meddle with a birthing woman-he'd kept well out of the hall during Maege's times…and Erena's.
Seizing on the thought, he said, "I was thinking of my aunt. Maege, my father's sister. Though he doesn't care to own it."
"Why not?"
Jorah felt a tug at the corner of his mouth, both at Daenerys' interest and at the memory of Maege.
"Because she rejected every match he tried to make for her and refused to marry even the men who got babes on her. She has five. Daughters all. And none of them," he added lower, leaning in toward her conspiratorially, his grin widening when she inclined her head toward him in like fashion, "carries the name Snow."
For a moment she gaped at him, round-eyed and open-mouthed in disbelief, then she sat back, her face lit with a wide smile and firelight.
"I like your Aunt Maege very much, even if Lord Jeor does not."
"She'd like you, too, Khaleesi," replied Jorah without thinking, but Daenerys did not find it too bold.
"Good," she said, plucking a fig from a bowl, "for I'm counting on you to get me northern supporters."
Jorah stuffed a handful of olives into his mouth. It did not seem prudent at this moment to point out to her that the north remembered that her father had burnt their liege lords alive, and that her brother plunged the country into civil war by running off with the Stark girl.
(But they would rally to her...He would make them see. After all, he had changed his mind about the Mad King's daughter, turning from spy to Daenerys' staunchest supporter.)
When he'd washed the olives down with a draught of water, he continued over another round of labor cries. "Maege is lord of Bear Island, in my stead. Her eldest, Dacey, will inherit after her."
Jorah half-expected Daenerys to make one of her declarations about restoring to him what was rightfully his. Instead, she said, "They're amenable to woman rules in Westeros, then?"
"They are on Bear Island. The women there fish and fight alongside the men."
The woman wailed, long this time. When it faded, Daenerys stroked Drogon's back and said, "Fight with them and fish with them...and bear their children, too."
Not Erena. She bore only the pain of watching him take Maege's babes on his knee while bleeding away her own. He did not love her well enough, and the wife he had thought Bear Hall held enough cubs without her breeding them, too.
"The figurehead on our gate is of a woman cloaked in bear fur," Jorah said, "with a babe at breast and a battleaxe in hand."
Daenerys sat, still and solemn for so long that she feared he had been wrong to tell her. That he had only brought her more pain, as though it were not enough that he had been to carry her into the death tent.
Blood and shadows.
But she took his hand, heedless of the oil from the olives which clung to his fingers. "When the Seven Kingdoms are mine, I would look upon her with mine own eyes."
For a moment Jorah was too overcome to speak, whether because her appreciation of his love for his home, or at the thought of returning there with her, and the impossible sweetness of it, he could not say.
Giving her hand a squeeze, he pulled his fingers from her grasp and reached to tug her hrakkar back over her shoulders.
"When the Seven Kingdoms are yours, you might have such a one commissioned for the Red Keep. Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Mother of Dragons."
"Posed in the cloak my khal made me, with a dragon at my breast?"
"And one on your shoulder. Just as I beheld you that morning."
He smiled, hoping she would return it as she usually did, but she glanced away to where the dragons, sated, curled together in the folds of the hrakkar like a litter of sleeping kittens. They were not kittens, though, no more than the skin of the beast into which Daenerys now hunched again as the laboring woman bellowed.
"Did I cry out when I labored?"
Daenerys had not asked him about the birth since she woke from her fever and was told her son was dead. A foolish, cowardly part of him hoped she never would. She was far braver than he.
"I could not say which screams were yours and which that accursed maegi's."
Her eyes darkened, but for two pinpricks of light where they reflected the flame in the brazier. The hatred in her heart had not burnt out; death could pay for life, but it seemed insufficient to pay for death.
"Do you think she spoke the truth, Jorah? That I will never bear a living child?"
Jorah did not at once answer. He could not, his throat strangled with sorrow as the shadow cloaked him again. The woman wailed, on and on… Hours...days...a week he had kept vigil over Daenerys, after her son had been born dead. Scaled like a lizard, blind, with the stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. Erena's voice whispered to him through the years, and he'd bowed his head as he had then, ear almost touching her lips to make out her plea of forgiveness for not giving him an heir. It was he who needed forgiveness. For not loving her well enough… As he loved his queen, he'd admitted to himself as the fever burned through her. The queen whose child he'd endangered, long before he brought her to the maegi. Whose death would have been the price of his life, though he'd lain it down for her.
His eyes rested on the dragons, whose scales shifted colors in the flickering light. Flesh made of a fire that had not consumed their mother.
Lifting his eyes to her, he said, "Once I held no truck with witches or their curses. Now I've seen a queen who walked through fire and brought forth dragons into the world."
Her face fell, and so did Jorah's heart with the thought of the trust she placed in him to reassure her as he had those early days of her marriage to the khal. He touched her chin, drawing her face up to meet his gaze.
"But there are greater powers at work in this world than Mirri Maz Duur's. Do not give up hope, Daenerys. I have not."
Hope of home, hope of his own babes…
Hope of her.
She smiled and took his hand.
"Thank you, my bear. This is exactly what I meant by the pleasure of your company. Now," she went on, not giving him time to respond, "it would please me very well to hear more of House Mormont."
Jorah must have looked unwilling, because she changed to a gentler tack. "If you will tell me. I would not give you pain."
"It is my shame that pains me, not my kin. To speak of them will bring me nearer."
She would bring him back to them, if anyone would.
So through the long watch of the night he told her of Alysane, who could track any beast through the woods and could also sniff out whenever her own small girl was up to no good; of Dacey, the fair giantess who loved to dance and wielded a sword with as much grace; of Lyra, the quiet one who startled them all with an occasional wicked humor; of Jorelle-his namesake, he said, his throat constricting (did she hate her name now?)-who alone of the brood liked nothing better than to borrow books of him and lose herself the winter long in the stories of their kingdoms and beyond; and of Lyanna, not five when he went into exile, the fiercest of them all. He talked until his voice became hoarse, and at length he had to stop, though as he quenched his dry throat Daenerys continued in her same attitude of attention.
"The screams have stopped," she said, at the same instant as Jorah noticed it.
They turned their heads toward the tent flap as an infant's first rasping cry rent the night, followed by cheers and prayers of thanks in the tongues of the Lhazareen and Dothraki.
The dragons all sat up, alert, and Jorah once again though of kittens-though he wouldn't want one of Daenerys' beasts near a babe.
"Come, Ser Jorah. We must greet my newest subject and congratulate the new mother on her blessing."
Though it did not at all surprise him that Daenerys put aside her own grief to wish another joy, Jorah gaped up at her. "You wish me to attend?"
Once again Daenerys laughed at his confusion, stooping to kiss the bald top of his head as she stood, the lion pelt cascading from her shoulders. "I wouldn't deprive them of the pleasure of your company."